Can Twitter’s Big Data Influence The Music Business?

Twitter is a vast repository of all sorts of data on trends and users, but that data isn’t always easy to delineate, even for Twitter. Now a new venture with former Warner Bros top exec Lyor Cohen’s new 300 label intends to take advantage of the social network to discover new music trends and artists bubbling under the radar.

Under a joint agreement announced at the recent MIDEM music business conference in Cannes France, 300 (who’s name was derived from the movie of the same name) now gets to organize Twitter’s music data, including some that’s not available to the public (like location tags that shows from where tweets were sent from). The company also plans to develop software around the information that might also be useful to musicians, record companies and publishing companies.

The venture is important for the Google GOOG +0.72% backed 300 (Google is its largest investor), but it’s also important for Twitter, current victims of a weak earnings report, as well. Just the fact that it’s accumulated a treasure trove of data over its seven years of existence isn’t doing the company much good at moment, but having a partner make new use of it in one sector could give it ideas on how to repurpose other data for non-music industries, which could provide an additional income stream and even help the stock price.